By Richard H. Levey
Online advocates have joined forces in seeking additional protections for private messages among organizations that have messaging platforms. The organizations’ initial efforts center around collecting organization and individual names for Make DMs Safe, an online letter/petition aimed at six tech companies: Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Slack and X (formerly Twitter).
NTEN, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that links people who use technology for social change, and Fight For The Future, a Boston-based collection of artists, engineers, activists and technologists who coordinate online protests that support public interests are leading the push.
Organizers are urging tech companies to implement end-to-end message encryption as a default. As the organizations’ letter states in part: “We are activists organizing for change; journalists who communicate with sources and about sensitive stories; nonprofits providing care and support for our communities; companies that need to streamline our processes and share ideas; students, creators, gamers, alumni, artists, athletes, and other communities that use the Internet to connect with people all over the world.”
The letter further asserts “In the U.S. and around the world, governments are using data and digital communications to target human rights defenders and people exposing human rights violations, including nonprofits, activist networks, and journalists. For many of these groups and individuals, the ability to message people online is absolutely vital, but it could also become the basis of government targeting, repression, and censorship.”
The organizers stress the urgency in the letter’s purpose by citing the 2022 case of Jessica and Celeste Burgess, a mother and daughter who were sentenced to prison after Jessica Burgess, the mother, obtained abortion-inducing pills via the mail in spring 2022 and gave them to her then-17-year-old daughter. According to an Associated Press story about the sentencings, “Police secured a search warrant to gain access to Facebook messages between the two, where prosecutors say the women discussed terminating the pregnancy and destroying the evidence.”
As the NTEN and Fight For The Future organizers wrote in material supporting their online letter/petition, “It’s awful to think that the DMs between the teenager and her mom in Nebraska would have been safe if only they had used a default end-to-end encrypted platform like WhatsApp.”
To date, the Make DMs Safe letter has been endorsed by more than 80 organizations and more than 5,500 individual signators, although as Fight For The Future Campaigner Leila Nashashibi wrote in an email to The NonProfit Times, “Individual signatures are not our focus.”
Nashashibi further noted that a sister campaign, Make Slack Safe, had garnered 100 organizational endorsements. The first-tier goal for Make DMs Safe is to match that number, she added.
Once collected, the petition and signatures will be delivered to the six targeted tech companies. Details as to how the petitions will be delivered are in the process of being established.
“While we haven’t yet connected directly with organizations who have been negatively impacted by the lack of access to end-to-end encrypted platforms, there is reporting on the types of digital precautions abortion groups, for example, are being forced to take to protect themselves,” Nashashibi wrote, referencing clinics that have turned to either paper or encrypted communication mediums.
The efforts won’t stop once the letter is delivered. “NTEN is committed to collaborating with Fight for the Future to continue pushing for safety for both nonprofit staff and the clients and participants they serve,” NTEN CEO Amy Sample Ward wrote in an email to The NonProfit Times. “We are stronger together, including with more nonprofit staff who join us in demanding technology providers include basic protections for our clients. We plan to report back to those who have signed onto the campaign and then general NTEN community as we have updates from platforms or new opportunities to raise our voices together.”
The letter, as well as an opportunity to add both individual and organizational names to the petition, are available here: https://www.makedmssafe.com/ntc/
